beats, william s burroughs - book - 2011 - Naked Tea: The Burroughs Bits

Naked Tea: The Burroughs Bits
Philip Willey with George Laughead
illustrations by Lyle Schultze
2011
54 pages

This book is a brief piece of William S. Burroughs fan-fiction, apparently excerpted from a novel-in-progress by Philip Willey.  Although the author is writing a novel, his name only appears online in conjunction with other small publications, or with anecdotes about meeting writers.  Naked Tea is, according to the book’s website, inspired by meetings with Burroughs.  Willey (I believe it to be the same Willey, although I may be mistaken) previously contributed an anecdote about meeting Henry Miller to a 1989 book titled Brushes with Greatness: An Anthology of Chance Encounters with Celebrities.  Willey seems to have a knack for turning his run-ins with authors into writing of his own, as exhibited in Naked Tea.

This book is a small and short self-published work featuring a brief narrative of hanging around and talking which includes William S. Burroughs as a character.  The writing itself is more Hunter S. Thompson (who is referenced directly in the text) prose-style than Burroughs, and so is much of the art, which (sorta) evokes a pastiche of Ralph Steadman’s wild illustrations, with one exception being a mixed media image that looks like a modified piece by Jean Dubuffet.  The text is a tribute to Burroughs, more than anything else, as it often reads as a stream of unexplained references to Burroughs fairly large and disjointed body of written works.

Lyle Schultz - 2010 - The Cut Ups (featured in Naked Tea)

Jean Dubuffet - similar to an image in Naked Tea!

The pieces written by Willey are imaginary conversations with the great American author, and this book thus makes an odd and fictional companion to other collections of Burroughs interviews such as the Semiotext(e) publication Burroughs Live, and the RE/Search books on Burroughs.  After two such imagined encounters between Willey (presumably) and Burroughs, the first at a tea shop (hence the title) the second at a rock concert, the book segues to a candid sketch of Burroughs in his final months contributed by George Laughead, the manager of the Kansas Heritage Group virtual library.  Laughead was a personal friend to Burroughs while the author lived in Laurence Kansas, and his online resource includes a Burroughs photo gallery and a page devoted to the Beat movement (which features a promotional statement regarding this book).

Apparently this is not the only work of Burroughs/Beats fan fiction out there...

Photo of installation by Marco Perego featuring a sculpted representation of Burroughs titled The Only Good Rock Star is a Dead Rock Star

secessionist, neo-confederacy - book - 2008 - Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction

Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction
Euan Hague, Heidi Beirich, and Edward H. Sebesta (eds.)
The University of Texas Press
2008
338 pages

“This is a book written by two well known opponents of anything to do with confederate history.” Stephen D. Echard

“The authors of this book are all well-known to have a pronounced bias against all things Southern and all things conservative. One cannot expect their book to do anythin else but reflect the biases of the authors.” Michael R. Bradley.

The above quotations are cut and pasted from two ‘one-star’ reviews of Hague’s, Beirich’s, and Sebesta’s collection of essays on the secessionist social and cultural phenomena they refer to as the ‘Neo-Confederacy.’  The above quotations are interesting to me because they presume the exhibition of editorial bias is synonymous with ‘bad book’.  This is not true, of course, but I’m somewhat fascinated by how pervasive and common it is to find this sort of sentiment expressed in regards to critical literature and documentary films.  I’m curious to know what the permitted perspective is on such subjects according to the authors of these ‘one-star’ reviews.  Should all writing be devoid of opinion and just aspire to describe things?  Is this attitude reflective of a facebook-style imposition of a ‘like’ function on all things that fosters an expectation that the public expression of opinion should only be oriented towards approving things?

Heidi Beirich is the current director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which draws a lot of negative attention from the radical right-wing in the United States.  Edward H. Sebesta is an independent scholar who runs the Anti-Neo-Confederacy blog and has done research work for the Southern Poverty Law Center in the past.  He has also maintained a web archive of a newspaper called The Citizens’ Council (the publication of the Citizen’s Council of Mississippi) and has edited another volume of Neo-Confederate literature.  I’m sure that these two editors are the individuals the above reviewers were referring to.  Euen Hauge is current chair of the Department of Geography at DePaul University in Chicago, where he specializes in teaching urban and cultural geography.  Many of his publications take the points where race intersects with place as their focus.

Anyways... Hague, Beirich, and Sebesta have collected a set of scholarly critiques of various aspects of what they call ‘Neo-Confederacy’, which is the persistent assertion that the Southern United States is home to a distinct social and cultural formation which is incompatible with the rest of modern America.  Over the course of 10 essays, this distinct cultural and its ideological supports are investigated by the book’s authors.  Seven of the ten essays were written by the editors, so that accounts for the editorial bias of this book, and they seem quite sharp in their critique of the statements issued by ‘Neo-Confederate’ commentators and writers.  

Many of the Neo-Confederate quotations used by the authors of this book are explicitly racist, or, for example, call for violence as a means of keeping social order.  The authors uncover many tensions amongst Neo-Conservative rhetoric that indicate that the purveyors of a return to the pre-civil war way of living in the American south desire an authoritarian rule for the benefit of white protestant men.  More specifically, the authors identify the white, hot-blooded, southern male as the pinnacle of human evolution, and for this specimen to properly express his values, he must be permitted to engage in violence against any offense to his honor.  Of course, the authors also identify Neo-Confederate voices that consider the perceived propensity for violence among non-whites as indicators of their inferiority.  What they truly call for, then, is a renewed Southern social order where the use of violence is legitimately exercised by white men to keep everyone else “in their place”.  This is a small example of the expressions of southern nationalism critiqued by this book’s authors, who discuss a full range of cultural forms and attitudes found in literature (such as the writings of the Southern Agrarians) and music and in small social groups (such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans) to define and affirm a desire to return to the Antebellum south.

The essays combine to form a critical cultural survey of Neo-Confederate forms, from their attitudes towards race, to the literature and music that expresses their ideals.  The views that Sebestra, Beirich, Hauge, and company critique fall within the far side of conservatism.  Some Neo-Confederate commentators, for example, note that the abolition of slavery was part of an elaborate plot to eradicate Christianity from the south, and furthermore that slavery was sanctioned by the Christian God.  The term ‘Neo-Confederacy’ sounds like a name, created by the editors of this book given to a broad range of Southern-nationalist expressions by the editors of this text.  If we take this to be a secessionist movement, then it is clearly different from the secessionist movement Thomas H. Naylor leads in Vermont.  Naylor suggests that Vermont must seceed because his state is uniquely progressive among the Union.  The Neo-Confederates, however, appear to want to leave the Union and leave the modern era behind.

PS: there is a mockumentary film that imagines that the Confederacy won the civil war titled the Confederate States of America viewable in its entirety on youtube:


 

hippies - film - 1979 - Hair

Hair

Milos Forman
CIP Filmproduktion GmbH
1979
121 minutes

Milos Forman, a director of films about the recent past (minus Amadeus), created this 1979 film based on a 1967 musical of the same name , written by James Rado and Gerome Ragni.  The film focuses on the friendship of two archetypes of the American 1960s: the free-spirited flower-child and the conservative army recruit.  Clean-cut country-boy Claude Bukowski, on his way to army army training, stops in Central Park in New York City (for some reason), where he meets John Burger and his group of hippie friends who end up becoming his surrogate family while he stays in the city.  Shortly after Bukowsky befriends Burger and company, they meet Shelia, a debutante from an upper-crust family who becomes another unlikely associate to the hippie gang.


This is what Bukowski sees when he arrives at Central Park:

The film explores a number of hippie tropes, mostly through the songs that now echo through various appropriations in other forms of popular culture, for example this: 

And this:  

These songs cover topics such as new age spirituality, destruction of racial boundaries, hallucinogenics, free love, war, sunshine, and non-conformity - which is symbolized by hair: 

John Burger is a tough NY hippie, recalling Abbie Hoffman in his attitude and appearance and fast-talking demeanor. Here's Burger singing "I Got Life" as he ruins dinner:

 He might also be a prefiguration of Ferris Bueller, whose antics bring his his friends to unlikely places where they are unwelcome (such as a posh garden party hosted by Sheila’s family) and, following Bukowski’s enlistment, into the army base.  Ultimately, Bukowski and Burger essentially switch places, as Burger is inadvertently sent to Vietnam while posing as Bukowski on the army base so that Claude can visit his hippie friends off-base.  The final turn of the film shows Burger’s headstone as Let the Sun Shine blasts.  This final scene includes the most visually striking (and haunting) shot of the film (seen from 2:32 in the video clip below), a show which shows the perspective of the soldiers walking in pairs into the absolutely dark interior of the cargo-plane that carries Burger into oblivion.  The shot provides the viewer with the perspective of being just above the soldiers of shoulders, giving the viewer the point of view of a protective spirit about to abandon its ward.

Apparently the film adaptation was disappointing to Rando and Ragni for its great reduction of the anti-war stance of the stage musical, rather placing the bulk of its emphasis on the free-spirited lifestyle of the whole hippie thing (“...man”).  Who knows why this happened?  Government-Hollywood conspiracy?  A loss of the sense of urgency as the film production followed the end of the war by a few years?  That there was a deemphasizing of the anti-war aspect of the ‘60s in Forman’s Hair, is surprising, because in the more recent Taking Woodstock, the anti-war attitude of the era is absent, even though the more recent film includes a character that is a Vietnam-vet turned long-haired hippie.  Compared to Taking Woodstock, the final scenes of Hair appear forcefully radical.

Some of the songs have been heavily sampled for music of the 1990s rave culture - here’s one example: 

 

street art, Keith Haring - book - 2008 - Against All Odds: Keith Haring In The Rubell Family Collection

Against All Odds: Keith Haring in the Rubell Family Collection
Mark Coetzee (ed)
2008
287 pages

Keith Haring was one of the major artstars of the downtown NYC art scene of the 1980s.  









He achieved renown when he was quite young for his cartoony drawings and paintings which featured an idiosyncratic set of symbols such as the barking dog:

and his best known symbol, the radiating baby:

Haring’s work was the point of convergence for a number of clear influences, including Andy Warhol’s pop, NYC graffiti, abstract expressionism, and semiotic theory.  Although Haring was not really a part of the NYC graffiti subculture, he is known as one of a small number of artists who emerged out of graffiti practice, as he drew his forms over sheets of black construction paper that were placed by the transit people in blank subway-station advertising space.

Against All Odds is a catalog for an exhibition of works of art by NYC 1980s artstar Keith Haring.  All of the works featured in the exhibition were from the Rubell family, Don and Mara Rubell, who were great collectors of recent American art.  The exhibition was held at the Palm Springs Art Museum, in Palm Springs California, from November 8, 2008 to january 19, 2009 (click here to see some of the images shown), and was curated by Mark Coetzee, then the head curator for that gallery.  This catalog shows how closely Coetzee worked with the Rubell family as it includes a detailed interview between the curator and his benefactors, and it also demonstrates how close the Rubell’s were with Haring, as they express an intimate knowledge of the artist that includes many personal anecdotes.  They also describe owning a scroll that features all of the different symbols Haring uses in his art.  Coetzee also includes Jason Rubell’s (Don and Mara’s son) interview with Haring, recorded a few weeks before Haring died of complications from AIDS in early 1990 where the artist described his philosophies towards his art.

Coetzee’s catalogue also includes an essay about Haring by Robert Hobbs, a visiting professor of art history at Yale University.  Hobbs essay compares Haring to the French artist Fernand Leger in their aesthetics and their populist approaches to art.  Hobbs makes some, to me, uncomfortable observations regarding Haring’s subway drawings that sets it as street art that transcends graffiti, because it compels the viewer to contemplate its meaning... unlike street art which is, according to Hobbs, intended for the admiration of other graffiti artists.  Of course, all graffiti/street art has the potential to provide a viewer with things to think about, so do television commercials or the architecture of public housing or highway interchanges or anything else “cultural”. This kind of observation which reserves for “high art” the capability of setting the viewer into a contemplative state is a pitfall of art-world people who are already committed to the eternal contemplation of high-status objects themselves.  Ignoring Hobbs remarks about graffiti, however, is not difficult, and his main points about Haring, Leger and semiotic theory are quite interesting.


Coetzee's catalog contains full page colour images of all the works featured in the exhibition. Many of the works are self-referential and include photographs of the infant or child Haring. This book also includes images by those artists most closely associated with Haring, including works by Warhol and Haring's fellow 1980s NYC art-star graffiti transcendentalist, Jean-Michel Basquait. The English text in this book is accompanied by a parallel Spanish translation, and the book ends thorough bibliography of written works about Haring as well as an exhibition history of the artist.

anarchism - book - 2001 - Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth

Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth
Peter Glassgold (ed.)
Counterpoint
2001
428 pages

For a brief period of time in the early years of the twentieth century, Emma Goldman was a well known figure in American society.  She did lecture tours, speaking to audiences on a variety of subjects deemed uncomfortable to mainstream society (such as self-governance, birth control, and a number of other topics) and she wrote quite a bit on these subjects as well.  Beginning in 1906, Goldman began editing and publishing a journal for anarchist ideas and social commentary titled Mother Earth, which ran until 1917.  Mother Earth was a fierce publication that eventually blazed out of existence amid its calls against the United States involvement in the first world war and the US Postal Service deemed the final issue inappropriate for distribution through the mails.  Goldman and her work was also the frequent target of law enforcement, and she was often prevented from speaking to audiences by police and was ultimately deported from the United States (along with her partner and lover, Alexander Berkman) because the anti-conscription stance taken in Mother Earth was deemed treasonous under the Espionage Act.

Peter Glaasgold, a contemporary poet and writer, edited this anthology of materials that originally appeared in Mother Earth.  His anthology is structured around topics (such as the definition of anarchism) rather than chronology, although many of the topics considered, such as the aforementioned discussion of World War One, or the later Russian Revolution, have a strong historical component that imposes itself on the structure of the book (these topics come up towards the end of the anthology, just as they occurred towards the end of the journal's existence).  Glaasgold always includes a contextualizing statement with each item, thus placing the item into its historical-social setting, and into a history of Goldman's journal as well.

Much of Anarchy! is made up of material written by Goldman herself, however a number of other writers are featured as well.  Alexander Berkman is included, of course, and the work of many other notable anarchist voices of the early twentieth century, such as Voltairine de Cleyre, Peter Kropotkin, Hippolyte Havel, and even the Russian novelist and thinker Leo Tolstoy.  The book also includes a number of reproductions of some of the original covers of Mother Earth, including a couple by the great dada-Surrealist photographer Man Ray (one of which is featured on the anthology cover).

One of Man Ray's covers

Glaasgold's anthology provides readers with a good survey of early twentieth-century anarchist social commentary from the most prominent voices of that particular movement.  The writing of the pieces are very clear and show the forceful but reasoned rhetoric of people who are passionate, and thoughtful, about the positions they take on certain social issues.  Finally, the editor's own contributions help the reader make sense of these now distant issues

computer hackers, phone losers of america - book - 2011 - Phone Losers of America: The Complete Zine Collection 1994-1997

Phone Losers of America: The Complete Zine Collection - 1994-1997
Brad Carter (ed.)
Big Beef Bueno Books
2011
818 pages

This book contains all 47 of the text files (issues 1-46 + pla-099.txt, an unauthorized issue) released by the Phone Losers of America, a phreak (phone hacker) group that’s more interested in malicious pranks than in learning every technical detail of the North American telecommunications network.  The group was led, and essentially just was (and continues to be) Brad Carter, AKA RedBoxChilliPepper, who had already rewritten some of the texts featured in this book, into another book called Phone Losers of America that has already been discussed on this blog.  In The Complete Zine Collection, the reader gets the complete original text files produced by RBCP and company (mostly written by him) in print form.  Of course, all of these text files are accessible already on the PLA website, and if you’re not an obsessive book collector and if you want to read them, then this particular publication is unnecessary.  

I remember two overarching attitudes amongst the members of the 90s-era, BBS based, hacker scene: the condescending know-it-all who is driven to learn everything about computer systems, network communications, and various infrastructures, and is also driven to call anyone who doesn’t possess their knowledge a ‘lamer’.  These people were, of course, insufferably irritating.  The other attitude were the malicious pranksters who wanted to exploit the technical failings of various systems for the purpose of fun and profit (generally in that order) - with fun usually meaning getting on other people’s nerves.  These people often exhibited a mean spirited humour that I would consider, socially speaking, a step above the mean spirited condescensions of the former category of teenage hackers that I described.  These two categories were not mutually distinct, and they can probably be broken down into the ‘black hat/white hat’ categories of hacker culture that have emerged out of somewhere.  

The PLA can probably be described as ‘black hat’, in that their investigations into the phone systems of the United States were generally geared towards pranking people and defrauding various phone services for relatively small amounts of money.  In other words, they were willfully malicious.  Their text files contain numerous accounts of these kinds of adventures, with RBCP also including stories of occasionally getting caught for his crimes.  Some of his stories are fictional, and I remember his fictional story about gradually taking control of his town’s infrastructure (pla-015.txt) was once published in an issue of 2600 magazine.   

The PLA text files were part of a large body of literature written by young men (for the most part) and teenagers about how to use telecommunications systems as an outlet for releasing destructive energies.  The PLA files are entertaining and informative (in their time) but were only a small component of the overall body of hack/phreak literature that was produced during the period of the 1980s and 1990s.  Jason Scott’s site textfiles.com contains a fairly comprehensive (although not fully comprehensive) library of these materials for anyone who is interested, because a largely forgotton teenage subculture existed during those two decades, oriented around practices of writing and analysis in combination with willfull adolescent destructiveness and angst.

The attitude in the zine is one of complete contempt and disrespect for most aspects of society, but especially for the people who work at the phone company and for the people who work at convenience stores.  This attitude often takes the unfortunate form of complete superiority over the “idiots” who work at these places, as expressed whenever the PLA puts one over on one of these people.  Maybe it’s possible that the underpaid wage-earners manning the operator phones and service counters don’t care about maintaining absolute security at the institutions they work for... after all, RBPC describes himself as an overbored convenience store employee in his book (the 'employment' page on Carter's personal website lists enough low-wage jobs that he could probably write a Dishwasher style book recalling his work experiences).  With that being said, the misanthropic attitude expressed by the PLA against normal people was prevalent among the BBS hacker text-file writing scene during that period, the PLA members were just funnier than most in their expressions.

So RedBoxChilliPepper wrapped up the PLA e-zine in 1997, although PLA continued (just look at the two books they published last year!).  Prank calls are probably the PLA’s primarily form of activity, and many of their .txt files included transcripts of them.  The whole ‘web 2.0’ world of user created content and the various service that facilitate delivering such content to users has been a huge benefit to Carter and friends, since he now provides content via youtube, sporadically produces two podcasts (PLA Radio and Big Beef Bueno), and an online radio show called ‘The Phone Show’ as well as maintaining the Phone Losers of America website.  


Here's just a video to show some of the recent work being done by RBCP:

outlaw motorcycle clubs, east bay dragons - book - 2003 - Soul on Bikes: The East Bay Dragons and the Black Biker Set

Soul on Bikes: The East Bay Dragons MC and the Black Biker Set
Tobie Gene Levingston, Keith Zimmerman and Kent Zimmerman
MBI Publishing
2003
263 pages

Tobie Gene Levingston is the president for life of the East Bay Dragons Motorcycle Club, a one chapter, three patch (well.. in some photos their cuts have three patches) club based in Oakland California.  The East Bay Dragons are also a blacks-only club that co-exist peacefully with the Oakland Hells Angels even though the HA are fiercely territorial with other clubs that claim the same space as them.  Levingston professes a long-lasting friendship with Hells Angels patriarch Sonny Barger, who has written a brief foreword for his friend’s memoir, and furthermore the writing here is assisted by the same two Zimmerman brothers who helped Barger write Hells Angel.  

The East Bay Dragons are the first outlaw black club in the Bay area of Northern California, at least that is the impression I get from Levingston’s memoir.  The author discusses his life, beginning as one child of a large family formed by sharecropper parents in Louisiana, progressing to his family’s move to California where he started a car club with friends and some of his brother in the 1950s.  The car club evolved into a motorcycle club, and a club that formed as outlaws in opposition to some of the already existing straight-laced and neatly dressed black-only motorcycle clubs.  Over time, the Dragons developed their own style for chopping bikes that was heavily influenced by the Hells Angels but also by an aesthetic sensibility that had them riding brightly coloured motorcycles, as seen in some of book’s colour photographs.

Soul on Bikes includes many of the kinds of anecdotes that are standard fare of biker memoirs.  Brawls, arrests and close-calls with police, the sometimes congenial and sometimes hostile relationships with other bike clubs, and the dangers and thrills of motorcycle riding, are all remembered fondly by Levingston.  Tobie Gene’s memoir also includes numerous accounts of interactions with the Hells Angels, and the book features a middle-aged Levingston giving a big smile while standing with Barger and his wife at some function.  

The book’s major point of interest is that it sheds some light on what its author says is a much larger phenomenon than what is represented in existing culture, that is the world of black motorcycle clubs.  While the East Bay Dragons are one club in Oakland, Levingston says that there are possibly a hundred such clubs in the Los Angeles area alone, indicating that there is much more potential literature on this subject as the “black biker set” is not mentioned in books like Daniel Wolf’s The Rebels, or Aurther Veno’s The Brotherhoods which provide a more academic view on the biker subculture.

anarchism - book - 2010 - We Are An Image From the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008

We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008
A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, and the Void Network (eds)
AK Press
2010
371 pages

We Are an Image from the Future is a collection of statements and testimonies pertaining to the anarchist uprising in Greece that began at the end of 2008.  The spark was the December 6 killing, by police, of a teenager named Alexandros Grigoropoulos, in the Exarchia neighborhood (essentially an anarchist/activist district) of Athens.  Rioting began within an hour of the shooting, and it hasn’t really stopped.

Makeshift Memorial at the site of Alexandros Grigoropolous' shooting

This book is almost 400 pages of photos and statements about the riots that erupted in Athens and other Greek cities following Grigoropolous’ killing.  The immediate anti-athoritarian frustrations that the rioters expressed in those initial few weeks evolved into a variety of concerns that have carried a vast and complex social movement through daily direct actions right up to this year.  The book’s title is prophetic, of course, as most of the anti-austerity outbursts in Europe, the Wisconsin strikes, the “Arab Spring” and the Occupy movement, and all of the general global unrest, has followed Greece.  

Schwarz and Sagris’ book includes many testimonies by riot participants and activist organizers, describing what they did, and what they witnessed.  Included are many accounts of street fighting with police and discord amongst activists over planning and ideology (which are pretty standard components of such books) and expressions of outrage over the actions of police and government.  Aside from the killing of the Athens teen and the resulting riots, there were three stories included in We Are an Image that stood out to me.  The first was a description of the occupation of a television station while it was broadcasting from one of its studios.  The second was the discussion with photographer Kostas Tsironis, who took a photograph of a police officer pointing a gun at protestors and was subsequently censored and fired from his position at a conservative newspaper called Eleftheros Typos.  

Tsiorias' photo of the police

The third story, which was referred to often by other contributors to this book, was of the vicious acid attack on labour leader Konstantina Kuneva, who survived the attack which has since been regarded as a symbolic example of the intense cruelty of a capitalist system in decline.  The first of these stories details the brazenness of the activists involved in these riots

We Are an Image of the Future is good for providing readers with the voices (it should be noted that many of the texts it includes were translated from Greek) of those people who were directly involved with the Greek riots of 2008.  It primarily gives readers the anarchist perspective on events, and more moderate leftist perspectives are largely absent, and the perspectives of the far right are not included to any extent.  Also this book is quite extensive and lengthy, and yet it only covers the first year of the events in Greece that have continued for at least three more years.

PS, a google image search on Kostas Tsiorias will result in many more images of the uprisings in Greece.

hippies - film - 2009 - Taking Woodstock

Taking Woodstock
Ang Lee
Focus Features
2009
120 minutes

Ang Lee, director of Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and his career centrepiece The Incredible Hulk (haha, just kidding), also directed Taking Woodstock, another film about chance encounters and personal transformations.  In Taking Woodstock, the time and place is upstate New York, 1969 - the crisis: the investor group planning the Woodstock Art Festival has already been barred from holding their from Wallkill NY and the need to find another venue quickly.  The solution: Elliot Tiber, the youngest chamber of commerce president in the history of the tiny-town of Bethel, NY, opens up his family’s “resort” to the Woodstock people as a headquarters, and helps them find a new concert venue on a neighboring dairy farm owned by Max Yasgur.  

The film is about the Woodstock arts festival, but its also about a small number of the small-town characters unbinding their uptight tendencies through their encounters with the Woodstock people and the hippie travellers, Elliot tries drugs and explores his homosexuality - his overbearing parents try drugs and dance in the rain, etc.  Max Yeager agrees to host the concert on his property as a rebellion against the town’s conservative population (who occasionally express their simmering anti-semitism and, at times, appear like they’re ready to launch a pogram against Yasgur and the Tiber’s).







The film presents a perspective on the famous Woodstock concert that pushes the music to the periphery, where it drifts into the centre an echo that’s heard across the rural countryside.  Elliot attends the concert in the sense that he’s on the Yasgur farm while music is played, but he’s so distant from the stage that it’s relevance is primarily to affirm the historical setting of the film.  Instead, the short-lived community that emerged, and the carnivalesque atmosphere that the concert created, is the centre of Lee’s focus with regards to the concert itself.  Elliott slides down a muddy hill and takes LSD in a van with a pair of hippies he met by chance.  

The reproduction of the hallucinogenic experience on film is a standard feature of virtually every hippie and drug movie ever made, from Reefer Madness to Easy Rider to Friday to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  The scene provides directors with an opportunity to indulge their facility with visual effects for their own sake, without concern for the constraints of fantastical plot advancements.  In Taking Woodstock Ang Lee places Tiber in a setting that was already decorated in abstract psychedelic patterns that begin glowing and moving after he takes the sacrament of the Aquarian age.  Lee’s filmic visualization of the psychedelic is, in fact, fairly conventional, but it is also true to much of the psychedelic imagery of the era he represents.  In a that vein it should be noted that one of the promotional posters for the film emulates the uniquely colourful ‘rainbow-inking’ printing technique pioneered at the San Francisco Oracle.  One of the hippies metaphorically refers to the vast audience as an ‘ocean’, and Lee uses visual effects to represent it as such in his own psychedelic flourish.

A scene from Taking Woodstock's Hallucination sequence

A final point of interest is the character of Michael Lang, the young hippie who organized the concert and, in the film, is represented as an old friend of Elliot’s.  The film is an adaptation of a heavily contested book written by Tiber, and one of its main disputants is Lang himself.  Tiber is the centre of this film, and he positioned himself as indispensible to the organizing of the concert.  Lang acknowledges Tiber’s role but regards it as minimal, asserting that some aspects of Tiber’s telling are altogether false, including the part where Elliot introduces Lang to Yasgur.  In Tiber’s version, Lang is always kind to Tiber and appreciative of his ideas and always acting as an intercessor between Tiber’s family, the hippies, and his own cost-obsessed investors.  Lang’s last words are in reference to his work in helping the Rolling Stones organize what ended up being the Altamont Free Concert, the anti-Woodstock where the Oakland Hells Angels worked as stage security and killed an aggressive fan (in self defense).